do. Here was the best
possible training for prospective women voters. To all this Mrs.
Stanton heartily agreed.

As they sat at the dining-room table with Mrs. Stanton's two
daughters, Maggie and Hattie, all busily cutting linen into small
squares and raveling them into lint for the wounded, they discussed
the state of the nation. They were troubled by the low morale of the
North and by the insidious propaganda of the Copperheads, an antiwar,
pro-Southern group, which spread discontent and disrespect for the
government. Profiteering was flagrant, and through speculation and war
contracts, large fortunes were being built up among the few, while the
majority of the people not only found their lives badly disrupted by
the war but suffered from high prices and low wages. So far no
decisive victory had encouraged confidence in ultimate triumph over
the South. In newspapers and magazines, women of the North were being
unfavorably compared with southern women and criticized because of
their lack of interest in the war. Writing in the _Atlantic Monthly_,
March, 1863, Gail Hamilton, a rising young journalist, accused
northern women of failing to come up to the level of the day. "If you
could have finished the war with your needles," she chided them, "it
would have been finished long ago, but stitching does not crush
rebellion, does not annihilate treason...."

Thinking along these same lines, Susan and Mrs. Stanton now decided to
go a step further. They would act to bring women abreast of the issues
of the day, Susan with her flare for organizing women, Mrs. Stanton
with her pen and her eloquence. They would show women that they had an
ideal to fight for. They would show them the uselessness of this
bloody conflict unless it won freedom for all of the slaves. Freedom
for all, as a basic demand of the republic, would be their watchword.
Men were forming Union Leagues and Loyal Leagues to combat the
influence of secret antiwar societies, such as the Knights of the
Golden Circle. "Why not organize a Women's National Loyal League?"
Susan and Mrs. Stanton asked each other.

They talked their ideas over first with the New York abolitionists,
then with Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and his dashing young
friend, Theodore Tilton, and with Robert Dale Owen, now in the city as
the recently appointed head of the Freedman's Inquiry Commission.
These men were in touch with Charles Sumner and other antislavery
members of Congress. A